Why Google is becoming the new Microsoft

Around the turn of the millennium, Microsoft was under siege from all directions. Rivals were nipping at its heels, offering alternatives to its most profitable products. Regulators were poking around, looking for signs of unethical activity. It was making me-too products, and using bundling to secure market advantage.

And now in 2015, Google is under siege from all directions. Rivals are... you can see where we're going with this, we're sure. Here are 10 reasons why Google today looks more and more like the Microsoft of then.

 Google partner don't make much money

You can blame laughably thin profit margins for the bloatware on cheap PCs - some OEMs are operating on truly microscopic margins in a market of me-too products. Android OEMs are beginning to understand that feeling, and with the exception of Samsung, the Android market is looking a lot like the PC market of old with endless me-too devices competing for our attention.

Some OEMs, such as HTC and LG, have balance sheets that make hardened accountants weep, and their glory days seem rather distant now

Google is loosing people trust 

To many, Microsoft was the evil empire of tech - something that clearly informed Google's famous "don't be evil" motto. Today's Google is a long way from that early promise, though, and there's a growing unease concerning Google's business activities and the information it has about us.

A good example happened this week: on the same day Apple launched a new, very transparent privacy policy and urged the world to read it, Google showed its advertisers ever more detailed ways to target people with sales messages. The internet wasn't slow to compare the two companies' posts.

 It got a reputation for malware

Windows today has very little relation to, say, Windows XP in terms of security - but the popular perception is still that Windows means viruses and other unpleasantness while OS X is shiny, safe and secure.

Exactly the same thing has been happening with Android, where despite Google's best efforts all kinds of poor quality apps continue to thrive. Google's Bouncer technology is supposed to spot malware and prevent it from entering the Play Store, but at the time of writing yet another new malicious app - Brain Test - has been downloaded between 200,000 and 1 million times